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Microsoft has released its slimmed-down email messaging app, called Send, on iOS devices. Plans for the app leaked in May under the name Flow by Outlook, but despite the new name, details about the hybrid email/instant messaging app have remained mostly the same. The app works with Office 365 business and school email accounts, allowing users to send quick messages to any email address without bothering with the subject lines or signatures found in traditional email. Microsoft seems to be aiming squarely at businesses, making several mentions of how the short communications are meant to be sent to co-workers. “While tools like text messaging and IM are great for short messages, you often don’t have your co-worker’s cell phone number or an IM app on your work phone…Send gives you the simple, quick text message-like experience while allowing you to reach all co-workers and have all of your communications in Outlook for reference later,” the announcement reads.

The app is notably only available on iOS at launch, with versions for Windows and Android phones said to be coming soon. Microsoft also claims to be working on making the service available beyond its own Office 365 accounts in the coming months. Only messages sent through Send will appear in the app, but all messages sent in Send will be synced in Outlook for future reference. Conversations started in Send can also be continued in Outlook, just as any other email exchange.

In a move sure to make app developers happy, Apple has blocked users running an iOS beta on their device from writing reviews in the App Store. Developers have been asking for the change because negative reviews from users enrolled in Apple’s Beta Software Program — based on an app’s inability to work with an obviously unsupported operating system — drags down the app’s overall rating and could hurt potential sales. Apple likely didn’t consider the issue a problem when developers were the only ones running a beta version of iOS, but with beta iOS versions being released to the public since March, it’s possible those less knowledgeable users don’t realize that many apps haven’t been designed to run with that software. Beta users trying to leave a review will now be met with a pop-up telling them that the feature isn’t available.

Popular email provider FastMail has announced that it is now offering full support for push email in the native iOS Mail app. While, like many other email providers, FastMail had previously released a dedicated iOS app for its service, it is the first third-party email provider to implement native push e-mail in the built-in iOS Mail app since MobileMe (now iCloud) and Yahoo Mail first introduced the capability in 2008. However, while iCloud only provides the pushing of new messages, FastMail’s implementation goes beyond this, pushing out updates for any changes to the user’s mailbox or other folders, so that the iOS Mail client gets updated instantly when messages are read, deleted, or moved using other devices. FastMail indicates that the new feature is automatically enabled for all accounts on its service and doesn’t require any special configuration on the iOS device; existing FastMail users should simply begin seeing e-mail updates pushed to their devices, and new users can setup their FastMail account in the iOS Mail app in the same way as any other generic IMAP account.

The Federal Trade Commission is looking into whether Apple’s cut of profits taken from rival streaming music apps violates antitrust laws, Reuters reports. Apple takes 30 percent of the $10/month subscriptions sold through iOS apps for streaming music competitors like Jango, Spotify, Rhapsody and others, leading those companies to complain that the higher-than-normal cut Apple takes forces them to charge more than they do on other platforms or see their profit margins eroded. Raising the price would mean making streaming subscriptions for competing music apps more expensive than Apple Music’s $10/month fee. Rivals could deny Apple its cut if users signed up for music subscriptions through their web browser instead of in-app, but Apple’s terms of service specifically prohibit advertising the app’s availability from other sources or linking to the company’s website from the app. These policies are more stringent than the ones Google places on app makers, and three industry sources said the FTC is looking at whether Apple’s tighter rules break any laws, but hasn’t the commission hasn’t yet started a formal investigation. Neither the FTC nor Apple commented on the issue.

An update to all three iWork apps for iOS has cleared up problems with Accessibility features. Apple says Pages, Numbers and Keynote had “an issue that prevented proper navigation and editing with VoiceOver.” Those problems are resolved in version 2.5.4, which also fixes text blurring in Pages when turning on Speak Screen.

In an email to developers, Apple has confirmed that app prices are increasing starting Thursday in Mexico, South Africa, South Korea and Turkey. A value-added tax is driving up prices by 10 percent in South Korea, but Apple has agreed to pay the tax for any developer living outside South Korea. Developers based in South Korea will be responsible for paying the new tax on their own. Users of apps with auto-renewed subscriptions in South Korea, South Africa and Turkey will need to resubscribe to confirm they accept the price increase. Users of similar subscription apps in Mexico won’t have their subscriptions interrupted, but they will still be getting a price increase. Apple is sending out emails to all subscribers in those countries to inform them of the price change and provide users with the necessary links to resubscribe.

Two new low-price tiers are coming to the Indian, Indonesian, Mexican, Russian, South African and Turkish App Stores too, along with updates to pricing in the tiers already in place in China’s App Store. Developers will be able to review the new pricing scheme in the Rights and Pricing section of My Apps. [via 9to5 Mac]

Apple has released iOS 8.4, and with it, Apple Music makes its much-anticipated debut within the redesigned Music app. Apple Music’s DJ-curated Beats 1 station will begin broadcasting at 12 p.m. Eastern time. The full scope of Apple Music features will eventually cost $10/month, but all the features are available to users free of charge for the first three months. iOS 8.4 also includes iBooks improvements and bug fixes.

Apple has apparently removed all apps that include the Confederate flag from its App Store, including games set around the American Civil War, TouchArcade reports. The move comes on the heels of a number of other major U.S. retailers such as Walmart, Amazon, and eBay removing all Confederate flag merchandise from their stores in the wake of the recent tragic shooting in Charleston. Apple CEO Tim Cook sent out a tweet on Sunday making reference to “removing symbols & words that feed” racism.

Developers affected by Apple’s decision have received messages stating that their apps are being removed as they include “images of the confederate flag used in offensive and mean-spirited ways.” Some developers have expressed concern that Apple may be casting too wide of a net, however, banning apps such as period-based games that incorporate the flag merely in an appropriate historical context, such as in games set around the American Civil war.

Google has announced the launch of a free, ad-supported streaming radio tier to Google Play Music, allowing users to listen to any of the service’s curated streaming radio stations without needing to pay for a subscription. Google Play Music has offered a free tier for some time that allows users to upload up to 50,000 of their own tracks and stream them from Google’s cloud, however listening to anything the user hadn’t specifically uploaded previously required a $10/month subscription to the Google Play Music service, originally referred to as an “All Access” subscription. This new tier provides users with access to curated stations by genre, mood, decade or activity, or search for favorite artists, albums, or songs to create a station of related music. Launching online today, the new free, ad-supported tier will arrive on iOS this week. The timing of introducing the free tier is interesting, considering Apple Music is a week away from launching.

As before, users with a subscription to Google Play Music will gain an ad-free listening experience as well as the ability to listen to music offline, create playlists, and listen to any song on-demand. The paid tier will also now include access to YouTube Music Key, Google’s new ad-free, offline and background listening experience for music videos on YouTube.

Apple has announced that its App Analytics tools for iOS Developers have been taken out of beta and are now available to all iOS Developers to assist in providing insight into how their App Store apps are performing in terms of performance, stability, and sales. New features have also been added to App Analytics, allowing developers to track crashes, paying users, and ratios. App Analytics are reported as anonymized, aggregate data from all iOS 8 users who have opted into “App Analytics” reporting during the iOS Setup process.

With the new, finalized App Analytics, crash data can now be viewed on a daily basis to measure the stability of apps, and data can be filtered by platform, app version, and operating system to help pinpoint causes and improve the user experience by addressing stability issues. Data on paying users has been improved to now be tracked by Apple ID instead of on a per-device basis, providing developers with a more precise look at how many individual purchases have been made. Number of paying users can be reported on a day-to-day basis so that developers can determine the impact of changes in spending within apps. Filtering by source can also allow users to see if users are being directed from a particular campaign or website. A new “Ratios” feature allows developers to view any two measures as a ratio so that they can gain more insight into app performance and marketing efforts, useful for tracking conversion rates, sales per paying user, sessions per active device, and more. App Analytics are available for all iOS Developers through the iTunes Connect portal for all users with a Sales, Finance, or Admin role.

University researchers have exposed a security flaw in iOS and OS X that lets an installed app exploit Apple’s cross-app resource sharing and communication to steal passwords from other apps and Apple’s Keychain, The Register reports. The team says they were able to upload their malware into an app that successfully passed the App Store’s vetting process. Once the app was downloaded, the researchers were able to raid users’ Keychain to steal passwords for iCloud, the Mail app and anything stored within Google’s Chrome browser. The team was able to steal banking credentials from Chrome, copy photos from WeChat and gain access to popular cloud service Evernote. Nearly 90 percent of a large sample of OS X and iOS apps were found to be “completely exposed” to the attack. Lead researcher Luyi Xing said his team informed Apple of the problem in October 2014 and complied with Apple’s request to hold off publishing the research for 6 months, but hasn’t heard back from the company since delivering an advance copy of the findings to Apple in February. Apple didn’t comment on the story, but Google’s Chromium security team has since removed Keychain integration for Chrome, saying the security flaw probably can’t be solved at the application level. AgileBits, which owns browser extension 1Password, said their company hadn’t found a way to fend off the attacks four months after the team’s disclosure. Since the malware was delivered in an app that got past Apple’s vetting process, the only protection for iOS and OS X users at this point is to scrutinize the developer before downloading an app and be wary of login prompts for things usually handled by Keychain.

Apple has confirmed that those camera-laden vans seen in public are indeed collecting images for use in Apple Maps. Apple has pledged to respect privacy while collecting its images, blurring faces and license plates before publishing the photos. The vans will be in some larger cities throughout the U.S., England, and Ireland until the end of the month. The push for adding images, combined with the new Transit feature coming in iOS 9 and a contract extension with TomTom, shows Apple is continuing its push to make Maps a viable competitor to Google Maps.

Although it wasn’t mentioned during Apple’s iOS 9 preview earlier today, a section at the bottom of Apple’s iOS 9 page reveals that the company also plans to release an Android migration app. Dubbed “Move to iOS”, the new app will likely be available as a separate download from the App Store as opposed to being bundled into the operating system, and will allow users to wirelessly move “contacts, message history, camera photos and videos, web bookmarks, mail accounts, calendars, wallpaper, and DRM-free songs and books.” The app will also help users “rebuild” their app library by suggesting downloads for free iOS versions of apps that the user had on their Android device, such as Facebook and Twitter, and adding paid apps to the user’s iTunes Wish List.

Apple is going to do away with Newsstand and introducte a free, Flipboard-style app that will show users samples of content from providers like the New York Times, Hearst, Conde Nast and ESPN, Re/code reports. Partners who complained about Newsstand burying their content will now sell their own apps on the App Store, with Apple taking 30 percent of revenue generated from subscriptions sold though the publisher’s own apps. Publishers will keep 100 percent of the advertising they sell within the new Flipboard-type app, according to unnamed sources. Apple will sell the ad space that publishers can’t, and will take a cut that one publisher called “very favorable.”

A bug in banner notifications through the Messages app allows a string of characters sent via iMessage or SMS to crash an iPhone, MacRumors reports. Receiving the string of symbols and Arabic characters causes an iPhone to crash and quickly reboot after the message pops up in a notification. After the reboot, Messages will crash immediately upon opening, unless it’s being opened to the conversation containing the offending message. Even then, trying to navigate to another conversation in Messages will crash the app. Reddit users found that replying to the original message solves the problem if the Messages app opens directly to the conversation containing the offending message. But if Messages opens to the conversation list view, the app will crash when opened until another message is received.

If you can’t get someone else to send you a message, sending yourself a message through Siri or through the Share sheet in another app is an option to resolve the issue. While the character strand is very specific and unlikely to be sent by accident, a quick search proves plenty of people have already started using the message maliciously. Until Apple rolls out a fix, turning off previews for Messages will help mitigate the immediate effects of receiving the message, and if someone is repeatedly sending the message to shut down your iPhone, blocking them is always an option.

Cortana — Microsoft’s answer to Siri — will be available to iPhone users through the App Store later this year, according to a blog post from Microsoft. Cortana will manage various functions across both an iPhone and Windows 10 PC — Microsoft notes that its “Cortana app can do most of the things Cortana does on your PC or on a Windows phone.” It will be able to answer questions, provide reminders, make notes, track flights and other routine tasks. There will be some limitations to the integration, however, as the iOS version of Cortana won’t be able to toggle settings or open apps on iOS, and isn’t integrated with an iPhone’s microphone to enable the hands-free access available on a Windows phone by saying “Hey Cortana.”

Microsoft hopes its new Phone Companion app built into Windows 10 will make PC desktops more appealing to iPhone users, allowing the phone to instantly upload photos, access music, work on Office documents and make notes that sync up with a user’s PC through the company’s OneDrive service. A preview of Phone Companion will be available in a few weeks, but Cortana isn’t scheduled to land on iPhone until later this year.

Adobe has announced that it will be discontinuing its Photoshop Touch app, preferring to focus instead on its family of more focused apps tied into its Creative Cloud program. A post on the company’s Photoshop Blog highlights Adobe’s other more recent offerings such as Photoshop Mix and Photoshop Sketch as examples of how the company believes it has produced better user experiences through “laser-focus” on specific and traditionally complex workflows for specific subsets of tasks, rather than the more ambitious approach of trying to replicate all of Photoshop’s capabilities in a mobile app. In a similar vein, Adobe has already started work on a new “serious retouching” app to add the the collection, dubbed “Project Rigel” which is expected to be available later this year.

Photoshop Touch is scheduled to be removed from the App Store on May 28th, and no further updates will be provided. Users who have already purchased the app prior to that time, however, will be able to continue using it on their devices or even reinstalling it from their purchase history “for the foreseeable future” – likely meaning for as long as it remains compatible with future iOS versions.

Apple may finally be adding transit directions to Apple Maps with the release of iOS 9, according to new information obtained by 9to5Mac. When Apple transitioned from Google Maps to its own mapping service, integrated transit directions were one of the casualties, and as a stop-gap measure, Apple provided plug-ins for third-party routing apps for getting directions, allowing users to start planning a trip in Apple Maps and then switch to another app, such as Google Maps or Transit app, to provide specific routing directions. While built-in transit routing was expected to arrive last year in iOS 8, Apple reportedly experienced difficulty getting the feature off the ground due to personnel problems and data, as well as coverage limitations, deciding to pull the feature just prior to WWDC 2014.

Sources are now indicating that Apple hopes to launch its Transit service with iOS 9, which would include bus, subway, and train route navigation as the major updates to the Maps app. The new functionality would not only include routing and trip planning for public transit, but also larger icons for airports, subway stations, and train stations, and a new Transit view to complement the existing standard, hybrid, and satellite views. In addition, Apple has also apparently been making headway on an indoor mapping project that would allow users to navigate major buildings, offices, and landmarks. Autonomous robots with iBeacon sensors are reportedly being deployed in buildings to collect data for the indoor mapping project, however it’s uncertain whether this feature will go live with iOS 9 or is simply being prepared for some future release.

Microsoft looks to be working on a way to make email conversations on the iPhone more like instant messaging with an apparent new app discovered by Twitter user @h0x0d. A posted image shows a general outline for Flow by Outlook, an app designed to let users have real-time conversations via their email accounts without bothering with the subject lines and signatures of traditional email exchanges. Only conversations started within the Flow app will be displayed there, separating out the more casual instant messaging-style communications from standard email correspondence. Users will be able to continue Flow conversations in Outlook. A disclaimer at the bottom of the image marks Flow as “Microsoft Confidential” and implores users not to discuss Flow or send Flow messages to anyone outside of Microsoft. [via ZDNet]